Ms Michelle Murphy:

The Cathaoirleach made a good point that policy coherence and the national planning framework will bring us forward. He is right that it does not get the prominence it probably should. We should all be discussing it because it will determine matters. As he said, there will be 1 million more people here. Our population is growing, but it is also ageing, so we need to think about how people will get from A to B, what kind of transport they will use, how they will access services, how we will deliver the services and how we will promote the town centre and village centre living and over-the-shop living, which, as Mr. Kiernan pointed out, we should be doing to revitalise town centres and make things more accessible.

We also need to be making things more accessible, particularly for people as they age. There is a huge regional element to this. When one looks at the north west, for example, connectivity is non-existent. People have to use their cars. If we are trying to reduce our emissions, get people out of cars and promote electric vehicles, then we have to look at how we connect the regions to Dublin in order to support people to get out of their cars, come to capital and engage in all of their other business. At the moment, in the north west in particular, there has been a lot of discussion around the A5 and it is really good to see some progress on that but we are seeing increased capacity on the road network because the connectivity piece is not there. It is the national planning framework that will, hopefully, deliver that and look at how we do it and how we resource those kinds of things.

It is also important to align the national planning framework with the county development plans. The latter involve significant public consultation but how are they going to align with the national planning framework? How do we, within that, pocket those areas of deprivation that the most recently published Pobal index shows, once again, are still highly concentrated in particular areas? What do we do to address that? It is hugely important and we need to be putting the resources in there. We need to look at the projections that we have for population and align services and infrastructure across transport, water, sewerage, housing and so on. We need to consider all of the different infrastructure we are going to need and how we are going to deliver it to the population across a ten, 20 and 30 year timeframe.